Let’s Hear from the Spies

In late 2008, the United States intelligence community produced a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the war in Afghanistan that has never been released to the public. The N.I.E. described a “grim situation” overall, according to an intelligence officer’s private briefing for NATO ambassadors.

In late 2010, there was another N.I.E. on the war. This one painted a “gloomy picture,” warning that “large swaths of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the Taliban,” the Los Angeles Times reported. This N.I.E., too, has never been published.

This autumn, intelligence analysts have again been poring over their secret district-by-district maps of Afghanistan, finding and assessing patterns. A new N.I.E. on Afghanistan is just about finished, people familiar with the latest draft told me this week. This one looks forward to 2014, when President Obama has said U.S. troops will be reduced to a minimal number, and Afghan security forces will take the lead in the war.

The new draft Afghanistan N.I.E. is a lengthy document, running about a hundred pages or more. As is typically the case, it is a synthesis, primarily written by civilian intelligence analysts—career civil servants, mainly—who work in sixteen different intelligence agencies. These days, an Estimate usually contains “Key Judgments” backed by analysis near the front of the document. There are six such judgments in the Afghanistan draft, I was told. I wasn’t able to learn what all of them were; according to the accounts I heard, however, the draft on the whole is gloomier than the typical public statements made by U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan.

Those generals and their aides have lately been talking up signs of progress, such as improved security in Kandahar and Helmand provinces and a reduction in self-reported statistics on violence, even though other statistics, published by the U.N., suggest that things are still getting worse. The draft, however, is said to raise doubts about the authenticity and durability of the gains the military commanders believe they have made since Obama’s troop surge began in 2009.

The findings also raise questions about the Administration’s strategy for leaving behind a stable Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai is due to step aside in 2014, at the end of his second term, as the Afghan constitution requires. The N.I.E., I was told, includes a forecast that the next generation of political leaders is likely to be—and to be seen by Afghans—as corrupt. The Estimate also raises doubts about the pillar of the Administration’s strategy, the training and equipping of about three hundred and fifty thousand Afghan military forces and police. The report notes that the projected cost of running an Afghan force of that size is about eight to ten billion dollars annually, a sum that may well outrun the will or the fiscal capacity of the United States. A withdrawal of American funds would leave the Afghan forces vulnerable to a crackup. (At the same time, those costs are only a tenth or less of what the U.S. currently spends each year on the war.)

Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson at the White House’s National Security Council, told me that she was “not in a position to comment on the content of a purported N.I.E.” As to the high cost of sustaining a large Afghan military after 2014, she added, “We fully recognize this reality. Accordingly, the U.S. and other donors are working with the Afghan government to clarify the long-term costs for sustainment … and how to best ensure that these costs will be met.”

On the corruption issue, Hayden acknowledged that it “remains a challenge.” Overall, she said, “We readily acknowledge that huge challenges remain in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President’s announcement in June marked the beginning—not the end—of our effort to wind down this war.”

It does not require secret information to assess the Afghan stalemate trenchantly. According to Lexis-Nexis, the Times has published two thousand four hundred and seventy stories mentioning Afghanistan since the first of this year alone. Add to that archive the essays and reports on the Af-Pak Channel and the publications of the European-funded Afghanistan Analysts Network and, presto, you have all the raw material required for your own, customized N.I.E.

Yet the formal, rather more expensive N.I.E. has a distinctive status and credibility in Washington. The finished documents, typically classified Secret or Top Secret, are particularly influential with members of Congress, in part because they are meant to be free of partisan spin. The N.I.E. is also intended to be a vessel for intellectual independence within the intelligence community. In that respect, the accounts of the latest Afghanistan N.I.E. raise some worrying questions.

As the draft has neared completion this fall, Marine General John R. Allen, the American commanding general in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker, the recently arrived United States Ambassador in Kabul, signalled that they find it too pessimistic. They intend to co-author a “comment” that might be included as an alternative or dissenting view in the final document, perhaps in the form of a sidebar box, I was told this week. Last year, Allen’s predecessor, General David Petraeus, who is now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, submitted, from his command headquarters in Kabul, such a memo for the 2010 N.I.E. Petraeus argued that the intelligence that had led civilian analysts to their negative assessment of the Afghan war was out of date.

After the debacle of misreported intelligence during the infamous 2002 N.I.E. on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence community made changes to try to ensure a drafting process of high integrity. Thomas Fingar, who oversaw some of the reforms, described the process in a 2008 speech. The protection of dissent was certainly one of the goals of the post-Iraq reforms. But they were not intended to create yet more ways for four-star generals to be weigh in on finished intelligence. The idea was to protect civil servants from a politicized process—to defend the proverbial analyst-dweeb (i.e., Chloe O’Brian on “24”) who might be poorly socialized but who happened to see what her slick bosses had overlooked.

Petraeus, Allen, and Crocker all have access to anyone in Congress they want to see; they have networks of powerful friends and supporters across the capital; and they have a seat at virtually all White House deliberations about war and security issues. They should follow their consciences and speak freely. But the idea that they really require the dissent or a “comment” channel in the N.I.E. drafting process to make certain that their views of the Afghan war get across to Congress and other decision-makers is, in the Estimates' way of putting things, doubtful. The generals own a formidable bully pulpit. The N.I.E. is the rare forum where civil servants can reply.

At his confirmation hearing last June, Petraeus acknowledged his desire to weigh in on N.I.E.s while he was in uniform. He said he had disagreed with four N.I.E.s produced about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while he was in charge—twice because he felt that civilian-led analysis was too pessimistic, and twice because he believed it was too optimistic. “My goal has always been to ‘speak truth to power,’” Petraeus said.

Petraeus is power, however—he is arguably the most influential man in Obama’s Washington, by dint of his office in Langley and his cross-party political prestige.

One fear expressed when Obama nominated Petraeus to run the C.I.A. was that his appointment would further “militarize” American intelligence. There are many reasons why this would be undesirable, but one is that, these days, the efforts of civilian intelligence analysts are often directed toward issuing report cards about the military’s performance in Afghanistan. It is not in the public interest to have military officers evaluate themselves.

Last month, Kimberly Dozier reported about sensitive changes in C.I.A. analytical procedures. Her reporting prompted Petraeus and Deputy C.I.A. Director Mike Morrell to issue clarifying statements that the changes would not increase the military’s influence over N.I.E.s or other intelligence analysis. Yet the anxiety persists, as I heard during my rounds this week.

It is hardly surprising that some military officers in a war zone tend toward optimism, while some civilian analysts, looking at the same facts, tend toward despair. We select generals for their confidence and determination—for good reason. Yet that is one among many reasons why generals are excluded by constitutional and legislative design from strategic policymaking, and are not meant to have outsized influence over decisions in the White House about war and peace.

In the Afghan war, there are now two plausible choices. President Obama has committed to one of them: a gradual drawdown by 2014, accepting three more years of sacrifice in blood and expenditure (on a declining slope, it is hoped), in the expectation that Afghan forces can be built up to hold off the Taliban, protect civilians, and prevent civil war, which would almost certainly spill into Pakistan, making things there even worse. Another choice would be to declare that the 2014 project is unaffordable and beyond hope, and to bring troops home faster and sooner. Both choices involve risks.

Let us have the facts, as the intelligence community describes them. Obama should publish unclassified versions of the key judgments in the latest N.I.E. once it is complete. The Bush Administration did this twice at the height of public controversy over the Iraq war.

The United States is about to elect its next President in the second decade of a distant, expensive Afghan war. The soldiers and Marines who risk life and limb on foot patrols in Lashkar Gah and Maiwand deserve, when they return to their Forward Operating Bases and watch Fox News while eating their starchy meals on Styrofoam trays, to hear an election-year debate in which no fact, no interpretation, and no question about the war is suppressed. We know amply what the generals think. Let us also hear from the spies.

Photograph: On July 11th, moments after assuming command of American forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen greets the Afghan Defense Minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak. Charles Ommanney/Reportage by Getty Images.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad. He is the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.”